Goodness, but we are current!

As always, Time magazine has come out, just in time for Easter, with a cover story on Christianity, this time on the topic of Hell.  It’s actually more about the pastor of a mega church – Mars Hill Church outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan – and usually the Easter issue of Time has more to do with the resurrection or the Jesus Seminar.   Time must have found out that articles on religion are good sellers around Easter – and Christmas too.

What is fascinating to me about the article are two things:

First, that anyone still believes that the God we worship – you know, the “God is love” kind, the one Jesus likened to a benevolent heavenly Father, who cares for us as his little children – that anyone professing that sort of God (and even the most Fundamentalists among us do) can still think God created or at least tolerates a Hell where people are tortured forever.  And ever.  And ever.    Even a little while would be bad enough.

But alas millions of Christian people do believe in that Hell, and a God who sends people there.  And so when an Evangelical like Rob Bell (the aforementioned mega church pastor) writes a book daring to question such a primitive and horrifying God, a whole bunch of people cry Foul! and declare him to be a heretic.  Such is the state of the evangelical/fundamentalist world of America.

But aside from that, given our reading of Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg, I am taken by the language used in the article.  The writer clearly uses the modern – Enlightenment – ideas of what belief is.   Belief is “traditionally” he says (Armstrong would say only recently “traditionally”) “the key is the acknowledgement that Jesus is the Son of God, who, for us and our salvation came down from heaven . . . and was made man.  In the Evangelical ethos one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell.”

There it is: belief as intellectual assent, the affirmation of a list of statements about God.  Here is logos – rational, thinking language -- rather than mythos – symbolic, experiential language.  

Pastor Bell is daring to approach God through metaphor, reading the Bible not as a prosaic prescription for describing God but instead as poetry, symbol.  And he’s getting into trouble for that from the right.

Let me add a third observation about the article, or rather about something Bell says in it.  Namely:  “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian.  Something new is in the air.”

Marcus Borg, John Crossan, Karen Armstrong would agree, and might say that “something new” is already here, in people for whom faith does not mean intellectually affirming things that are patently false, but is rather experiencing the mystery of the universe that is God – unknowable, refusing to be limited by our language and minds – and in response to that awe seek to live compassionate, gracious lives.

Another recent book answers Bell’s wonderment with a resounding Yes, something very new is happening!   Phyllis Tickle in The Great Emergence (2008) says that every 500 years the followers of Christ – the Church – has undergone a tremendous change.  The last change was the Protestant Reformation.  We are now in the midst of another revolution, she says, out of which will emerge a new faith, a new Christianity.  One that I would think will have a lot to do with what we have been reading about in Borg, Crossan, and Armstrong – and Ellul too.

The Case For God Reader's Digest Edition

"For what it's worth," here are my notes on the Armstrong book  . . . what I thought was important, and an attempt to string her argument together.  Maybe this will at least be a review if you have read it, and a quick overview if you haven't.  Sorry this isn't in more polished form, but here it is.

I stopped at the Epilogue -- you can read that for yourelf :)

Introduction – the difference between Logos and Mythos;  “reason,” used for external reality and spiritual, internal, symbolic reality.  Both realities are “real” in the sense that they are both experienced.  But they are used in different arenas.

Logos relies on measuring material things, apply logic to describe, control , and even predict what is happening, really, in the world of the senses.

Mythos relies on non-measurable, internal experiences, using symbol – metaphor – to describe it.  Here control and predictability are far more challenging than in the external world.  And I would say that when practitioners of the spiritual realm – religious people usually – imagine they can by their knowledge and authority in that realm control and predict spiritual experiences they end up doing very bad things, and in the name of God.

“Myth” in common parlance means something that is not true.  But in the religious world “myth” is a true construct – a framework by which we can talk about spiritual realities, spiritual truth.    The story – the myth – that carries the spiritual truth is not historically accurate or scientifically accurate.  But it nevertheless communicates true things about people and life, and even God.

In pre-modern times religion “was not primarily something that people thought but something they did.”  It is a “discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.”

The modern period applied logos – rationalization – to religion.  Logos and mythos were compared, and the vast accomplishments of science made logos superior to mythos.  Facts overtook symbols in our view of what is true, real, important, and reliable.   And that spawned, ironically, two opposites:  fundamentalism and atheism.

Part I:  The Unknown God

One: Homo religiosus

“Religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of relentless pain and injustice of life.”  We are meaning-seeking creatures . . . .

“The desire to cultivate a sense of the transcendent may be the defining human characteristic.”

The earliest humans sensed and sought that transcendent mystery – their art is evidence of that.  They created rituals to express the transcendent. 

The second principle of premodern religion: religious discourse was not to be taken literally, but symbolically.  People weren’t expected to “believe” a single creation story.  Rather, there were several that expressed religious truth.

Another universal principle of religion:  “religious truths are accessible only when you are prepared to get rid of the selfishness, greed, and self-preoccupation that . . .  are the source ofo so much of our pain.”

Buddhism:  no doctrinal statements to accept.  That would be abdicating one’s responsibility.    The best way of  to anatta – selflessness – compassion, the ability to feel with the other.   This religion is doing rather than thinking.

Two: God --  Hebrew religion

The Bible:  based on the several creation stories, “From the very beginning there was no  single, orthodox message in the Bible.”  Conflicting images of God in Genesis.

“Revelation would never be something that had happened once and for all, but an ongoing process that could never end.”

Deuteronomists were depicting Joshua conquering Canaan.  They made violence an option in their religion.  Crossan said something similar.

Three:  Reason – The Greeks

Phusikoi – the “naturalists”  based their thinking entirely on the physical world.  Sought to find the underlying order, the laws that governed the universe.  Science – math, astronomy, geometry – these were spiritual exercises.

Mystery Religions:  not something you thought, but something you did.  Initiations were frightening – force the initiates to face their own mortality, experience the terror of death.

Socrates – when people were seeking certainty, he was asking questions.  Said the Phusikoi were not looking in the right place, were not asking the really important questions.  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Plato – “doctrine of forms.”  Allegory of the cave.

Asistotle – “the life of reason is best and pleasantest, since reason, more than anything else IS man.”  God was important to him, the “first philosophy, but his God was utterly impersonal.

300BCE – Six schools of thought: Platonism, Aristotle, Skepticism, Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism.   In  these philosophy “was a yearing for transcendent wisdom.”

Four:  Faith – Christianity and Islam

Destruction of the Temple in 70  CE.  Judaism, without the Temple and the sacrificial system it promoted, was forced to adapt.  In the "rabbinic Judaism" that was born, “Kindness would replace the temple ritual; compassion . . . was the new priestly task.” Compassion was central to reading the Bible.  Hillel said that everything in the Torah was simply commentary on the Golden Rule.

“Rabbinic Judaism”  -- “the religion of Israel came of age, developing the same kind of compassionate ethos as the Eastern traditions.”   Scripture was not a closed book, but rather miqra, “a summons to action.”

Meanwhile the Christians were getting organized.  They did not intend to start a new religion – they observed the Torah, worshiped in temple.  The experienced the Holy Spirit “as a tanagible, empowering, electrifying force.”

Jesus was the divine presence in their midst.

Resurrection:  not a “simplistic notion of his corpse walking out of the tomb.”  Paul said they would find him in one another, in scripture, in ritual meals.  Jesus was not “God.”

“Faith” – pisteuo --  trust, loyalty, commitment.   Jesus did not claim his divinity to be “believed,”  but instead he sought their commitment to him and to his calling that he shared with them.

Miracles: not surprising to first century people.  Jesus a skilled exorcist, a Hasid.  And his miracles were not central to his message – was reluctant to give signs.

Revelation: unfolding, dynamic.  The Talmuds were commentary not on scripture, but on the Mishnah.

The gospel reached the Greek world where the Logos was a familiar concept.  Early church fathers, educated by the Greeks, sought the Logos in the Bible, and interpreted it allegorically.   Origin said that the contradictions in the Bible were put there so as to make us look more deeply into the meaning of the text.

“The Qur’an has no interest in “belief;”  indeed, this concept is quite alien to Islam.”

Its message was not a doctrine, but an ethical summons to practically expressed compassion.”

Qur’an full of ayah – “sign,” “symbol,” “parable.”  We can speak about God only analogically.

In the early 4t century Christianity began to move toward a preoccupation with doctrinal correctness.  And at the same time some were seeking a spirituality of silence and unknowing.

Five:  Silence – mysticism

Council of Nicea, 325.  Sought to use WORDS to experience God.  But the monastic movement sought God in the silence. 

The purpose of the Trinity in the Eastern church was not to define God but to shut us up – to retreat into silence, to experience God in that silence.  It was to be a means to induct Christians into a wholly different way of thinking about the divine.

Augustine.

Denys:  sought to make us conscious of the limits of language.  The Bible was full of incredible things – not to be believed literally, but to be a means of learning how we are limited when we try to speak of God.

“God is known by knowledge and by unknowing; of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge,  . . . . . but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named.”

As our language fails, we experience an intellectual ekstasis . . . a kenosis that drives us out of ourselves.”  In that place of not-knowing we experience God’s presence.

Six:  Faith and Reason

By the end of the 11^th century  people had started to apply reason to their faith.  Anselm sought “to make traditional Christian teaching rationally coherent.”  For him “faith” was still a matter of the heart, though.  “God” was the greatest thing one could imagine – and greater.  The idea of God was innate, and did not need proof.

Islam – Al-Ghazzali – we can glimpse God by cultivating a different mode of perception, deliberately calling to mind the divine presence in every action in life.  The smallest action became a ritual that made God present in ordinary people.  Sufism became very popular as well.

Jews – Kabbalah – mythical, imaginative spirituality.

The Crusades – God was an idol.  “They foisted their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto a deity they had created in their own likeness.”

Francis – 1200 – emulated Jesus in every detail.  More literal-minded than the apophatics, but was more practical than doctrinal.

Aquinas – all our statements about God are inadequate.  “Man’s utmost knowledge is to know that we do not know him.”

Before offering “proofs” of God, he said, we must remember that because of God’s absolute unknowability we cannot define what it is that we are trying to prove.”

The primordial question: Why does something exist rather than nothing?

“Pushed to the limit, reason turns itself inside out, words no longer make sense, and we are reduced to silence.”   “Faith” for him was not intellectual assent.  “Faith was the ability to appreciate and take delight I the nonempirical realities that we glimpse I the world.”

All language about God must be analogical.

Along about this time students studied the sciences before theology;  they brought that language to religion – Ockham began to see doctrines as being literally true, and subject to exact analysis and inquiry.   Symbolism for him was out.  There started the rift between theology and spirituality. 

In the 14^th and 15^th centuries  people began seeking an experience with God through intense emotional states.  This was seen as a sign of God’s pleasure.  They had discarded symbolic language, in favor of analysis, and when this was found to be dry and boring they sought God through mindlessness, through generated experiences.

Eckhart – “For if you love God  as he is God, as he is spirit, as he is person, and as he is image – all this must go!  Then how should I love him? You should love him as he is nonGod, a nonspirit, a nonperson, a nonimage, but as he is – pure, unmixed, bright “One” separated from all duality . . . “

Julian – Unknowing.  All you an say is “God!” and “Love!”

This polarity created thinking theologians and loving mystics.  Theology had become incomprehensible to all but the highly educated, and arid too.  “Sham” experiences of God were being sought by many.

PART TWO:  The Modern God

Seven: Science and Religion

Columbus, 1492 . . . The Spanish force Jews and Muslims to convert, start the Spanish Inquisition to promote Spanish unity.  In the 16^th century  secularization was accelerated by the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.

Martin Luther: “a yearning for absolute certainty that would also characterize religion in the modern period.”   He found salvation in justification by faith alone.  And by “faith” he meant the premodern understanding:  “Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty, but a free surrender and joyful bet on his unfelt, untried and unknown goodness.”

The printing press put the scriptures in the hand of the common people.

On the Eucharist: is became “only” a symbol – “They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as though they were logoi.”   “Correct faith was gradually becoming a matter of accepting the proper teachings.”

Copernicus and Galileo – a heliocentric view fostered by the discoveries of science.  The Catholic Church, intent upon self-preservation, turned to strident dogma – away from not-knowing to knowing all, in order to establish certainty and its own power.

In like fashion Protestants too “came to regard scientific rationality as the only route to truth, and would seek a rational certainty that . . .philosophers had long held to be impossible I matters of faith.”

Eight: Scientific Religion

Beginning in 1618, the Thirty Years’ War killed 35% of central Europe – religion was powerless to stop it.  Catholic vs Protestant.

Descartes – sought a truth everyone could agree upon, uniting all in peace.   The experience of doubt was the foundation of his certainty.  “I think . . . therefore I am.”  For him, science was the answer – the discovery of God’s laws should be our pursuit, taking the wonder out of the world.  The scientists could talk about God – only math and physics could do that.  Here was the severing of faith and science.

The universe became mechanical.  Understanding its laws meant that someday “doubt and perplexity would be things of the past.”

Spinoza – Jewish philosopher. God was inseparable from the material world, an immanent force that wielded everything into unity and harmony.

Newton and Gravity.  God was becoming “a rational consequence of the world’s intricate design.”    For Newton, “mystery” was sheer irrationality.

An “atheist” in this time was anyone who held beliefs we disapproved of – deviancy from morality, norms.  Everyone believed that natural laws required a Lawgiver. 

“God had become a mere force of nature.  Theology had thrown itself on the mercy of science.” 

“But the new scientific religion was about to make God incredible. In reduceing God to a scientific explanation, the scientists and theologians of the 17^th century were turning God into an idol, a mere human projection.”

Prior to Augustine and Thomas said nature could tell us nothing about God;  now science said nature would tell us everything about God.  But what would happen when a later generation of scientists found another ultimate explanation for the universe?

Nine: Enlightenment

Everyone, including conservative preachers like Cotton Mather, were on board with science – “a wondrous incentive to religion.”  Newton’s laws revealed God’s great design in the universe.  Atheism had been disproven by the discoveries of God’s laws by scientists.

Rise of “Deism” – “sought to bring faith under the control of reason.”

“This emphasis o proof was gradually changing the conception of “belief.””  Thomas Jefferson:  belief is “the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.”

Pietist movement arose in reaction to the marriage of science and religion, the elevation of the mind over emotion.  Zinzendorf said that “faith is not in thoughts nor in the head but in the heart.”

Wesley too emphasized that religion is of the heart.  He said, “Orthodoxy or right opinion is at best but a very slender part of religion, if it can be allowed to be any part of it at all.”  

The First Great Awakening caused an excess of emotional indulgence.  A continued tension between head and heart, mind and emotion, science and faith.

Rousseau – said that religion’s God was a “mere projection of human desires.”  Instead he sought “a deity that would be discovered by kenosis, compassion, and the humble contemplation of the majesty of the universe.”

The romantic poets – Nature to be reverenced, it was imbued with spiritual power.  “Romantic poets revived a spirituality that had been submerged in the scientific age.”

As the Enlightenment proper drew to a close, some were wanting to turn back to more emotional, spiritual, intuitive faith, away from a mechanistic, unfeeling God of scientific law.

Ten: Atheism

Rise of Evangelicalism – a return to biblical authority, a religion of the heart rather than the head – felt conviction and virtuous living.  Thus the Second Great Awakening, 1800-35.  

Evangelicals brought with them “an unprecedented literalism” because it seemed more rational that allegorical exegesis.  They adopted Enlightenment’s idea of “belief” as intellectual conviction.

Huge increase in churches, from 2500 in 1790 to 52,000 in 1860!

Eleven:  Unknowing

Th 20^th century began with great optimism – Science was rolling back the limits of our knowledge, industry booming, inventions.  “Old certainties were evaporating.”

“But the First World War revealed the self-destructive nihilism that, despite colossal attainments, lurked at the heart of modern Western civilization.”

There followed the Great Depression.  “Modern secular ideologies were proving to be as lethal as any religious bigotry.”    Like all idolatries: Once the finite reality of the nation had become an absolute value, it was compelled to overcome and destroy all rival claimants.   – See Marx, Stalin, Hitler

Albert Einstein’s discoveries and theories – “Newton’s grand certainties had been replaced by a system that was ambiguous, shifting, and indeterminate.”  Scientists were beginning to sound like apophatic theologians – not only was God beyond the reach of the human mind, but the natural world was also terminally elusive.

Einstein’s affirmation of the reality of the mysterious  . . . 

Rise of Pentecostalism – sought “the immediacy of sense experience to validate their beliefs” – through speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, healing miracles.  While Evangelicals tried to make a case for a reasonable, scientific and yet Bible-based religion, Pentecostalists relied on personal internal experience.

Fundamentalism – on any stripe religious or not – “rooted in profound fear.”  Liberal Protestants went on the attack against the conservatives, and the Scopes trial placed evolution at the center of the debate.

WW II, the Holocaust – cast more doubt on the existence of an omnipotent God.

Key idea for Armstrong:

The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries.  The modern God [the God we 21^st century people typically assume, and the one the new atheists attack] conceived as powerful creator, first cause, supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable is a recent phenonmenon.

Many feel that the hopes of the Enlightenment [that the world is progressing, science will lead us from darkness to light, our faith is rational and supported by science] died in Auschwitz.  [That is, the Holocaust as the “last straw” in the progression of 20^th century disappointments:  WW I, Depression, Stalin, Hitler, WW II.]

Today we have amore modest conception of the powers of human reason.  We have seen too much evil in recent years to indulge I a facile theology  that says . . . that God knows what he is doing, that he has a secret plan that we cannot fathom, or that suffering gives men and women the opportunity to practice heroic virtue.  A modern theology must look unflinchingly into the heart of a great darkness and be prepared, perhaps, to enter into the cloud of unknowing.

Heidegger, Bultmann, Tillich – 20^th century theologians who argued that we can say nothing about God – saying anything will of course limit the reality of God.  “We experience the divine in our absolute commitment to ultimate truth, love, beauty, justice, and compassion – even if it requires the sacrifice of our own life.”

“By the middle of the 20^th century . . . there was no serene Enlightenment optimism in the rationality of human experience.”  But soon “new forms of religiosity, a different kind of atheism would arise . . .  Despite the fact that unknowing seemed built into our condition, a strident lust for certainty would arise as well.

Twelve: Death of God?

1960s  . . .  dramatic loss of faith by Europeans.   The Secular City  (1965) announced the death of God.  Huge changes in societal norms. 

“Postmodernity” -  skepticism about science, progress, rationality. 

Ordinary people, not just philosophers, began to claim the title of “atheist” – not always because they had studied the arguments but because of the times.  See Lennon’s Imagine. 

God was no longer necessary, but Jesus was popular – he defines what it is to be a man.

At the same time young people sought spiritual experience through eastern religion, drugs – a hunger for mythos.

Rise of “militant religiosity” revealed a “widespread disappointment in modernity.”  Jerry Falwell, literalism, anti-evolution.

In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith.  In their anxiety and fear, [they] often distort the tradition they are trying to defend.   Faith becomes idolatry – and always the idol forces its followers to destroy its opponents.

Islam fundamentalism acts just like any other kind of fundamentalism.  Armstrong wants to caution us Christians against giving the religion of Islam too much blame for the actions of the extremists, saying that their motivations are more political than religious.

The new atheism – “a militant form of atheism.”   Starts with Monod what said that “it was not only intellectually but also morally wrong to accept any ideas that were not scientifically verifiable.  He admitted there is no way to prove that assertion – thus admitting (says Armstrong) that even the scientific quest began with an act of faith.

Richard Dawkins – The Blind Watchmaker (1986)   Like Harris and Christopher Hitchens, “religion is the cause of all the problems of our world, the source of absolute evil and poisons everything.”

But Jay Gould “revived the ancient distinction and complementarity of mythos and logos.”  Spoke of two “magisterial,” both valid in their separate areas (science and religion).

Armstrong  very critical of Dawkins, Harris and  Hitchens because of the portrait they paint of Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) – as if all of faith is the faith of the Fundamentalists.   They “present religion at its absolute worst.”  For them “faith is mindless credulity.”   

She accuses them of the Fundamentalist Atheists, guilty of the very things they say faith is guilty of: 

-       Reductionism – reducing the enemy to a simplistic and inaccurate representation – a “straw man” easily attacked.

-       Intolerance – all religion, even Moderate religion, must be eliminated

-       “Show little concern about the poverty, injustice, and humiliation that have inspired many of the atrocities they deplore – they show no yearning for a better world.”  That is, they are so fixated on their own arguments that they have no morality to offer in place of the religion they criticize.

-       “Believe that there is only one way of interpreting reality.  For the new atheists, scientism alone can lead us to truth.”

Postmodernism – “Our knowledge is relative, subjective, and fallible rather than certain and absolute;  truth is inherently ambiguous.”  Postmodern people are suspicious of past truth-claims, and the stories that support them.

The Case For God, Sort of

Sometimes the obvious is very comforting.   In Karen Armstrong’s book – a sweeping review of what humanity all over the world, through the ages (starting 30,000 BCE!) has thought about Divinity – the obvious is that, a) thinking about “God” is complex, and imprecise, and on-going, and, b) the questions we are asking about “God” have been asked before.

I can add a third thing that shouldn’t be surprising, namely, that people have come up with wildly different conclusions about the above topic.

The above “obvious” statements are comforting to one, who, like me struggles with the questions.  If all those people before us – some very, very bright people among them – had a hard time deciding what is “real,” and how you know that, then why shouldn’t I? 

The people who along the line in every religious and irreligious setting imagined that they HAD found The Truth usually ended up doing some pretty stupid and harmful things in the name of that Truth.  I am not comfortable with that type – the know-everything crowd.  I think they just haven’t thought long enough about what they believe.  But that’s neither here nor there.

Armstrong begins – and comes back to this frequently through the rest of the book – noting that pre-modern people understood that there were two ways of “knowing.”  “Logos” – reason – had to do with pragmatic, day to day, earthly living – external reality that they could touch and see, and even predict.  But they knew about “mythos” too – the realm of human internal experience, the spirit, where “symbol” and “metaphor” communicated what was real.  Mythos could give meaning to logos.

Religion, it goes without saying, deals more with the latter – myth – than the former – empirical data, reason.  

Armstrong also lays the foundation early on for a key idea for contemporary religion, namely, that from the start religious ideas – the myths of premodern days – were not concepts to be embraced intellectually, affirmed by reason to be “true,” but rather stories to be lived, frameworks by which life and death made some sense, or at least could be accepted. “Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart.”   This is why, in Armstrong’s view, “ritual” is so essential for religion.  (And this is why music is so essential to religion, marking “the limits of reason.”

Armstrong through the book will document how logos – reason, the material realm – was so stunningly successful that it came to discredit mythos – symbol, the spiritual world.   And that’s where we are today -- the default measure of what is true is the scientific measure.  Only reluctantly, and always hoping that science will back us up, do we venture to believe the spiritual, the symbolic, the metaphorical truths of our lives.  

Religious people encountered the Enlightenment (and the triumph of science) like everyone else, and they too were enchanted.  Armstrong will document how the early scientists like Newton were religious people, seeing God’s law in the laws of science, and that even the Puritan preachers were sure that science supported their faith.  Religion became rational, reasonable.  And “Belief” became intellectual acceptance of creedal statements.  Christian fundamentalists came to interpret the Bible with extreme literalism, insisting that their faith was literal, and reasonable.

Armstrong will take issue with the contemporary atheist movement (and some other opponents of Christianity through the centuries), saying that the “God” they deny is exclusively the God of the fundamentalists.  Harris, I recall, made no apologies saying that his primary target was fundamentalism of Christianity and Islam.  Armstrong’s point, though, is that fundamentalism is NOT what faith is – in fact fundamentalism is a relatively recent development in religion.

To support that, Armstrong will insist that within Judaism, for example, Scripture while considered sacred writing, was never considered a closed book.  The Rabbis were not trying to find the “fixed, unalterable, self-evident truth” of the Scripture, but instead were wrestling with it find the life within the text, applying it to contemporary life.  This is in stark contrast to the sort of “proof-texting” used by the Pat Robertsons of the world.

For Judaism, “Revelation did not mean that every word of scripture had to be accepted verbatim . . .[Jewish] interpretation was unconcerned about the original intention of the biblical author.”  Not even the revelation at Sinai (the Ten Commandments) was considered final.  It was therefore up to the reader, within in the faith community, to understand the meaning of a passage for today.

“Belief” – again, this is a key concept for Armstrong and for people like Marcus Borg – to the ancient philosophers meant “trust,” “loyalty,” “engagement,” and “commitment.”   NOT intellectual assent to a proposition.  This is how Judaism and Christianity always used it, until that is the scientific age.

One last observation for now: It is interesting to contrast Armstrong’s citations from the Qur’an to the pages of quotes Harris offered.  Hers are conciliatory, inclusive, tolerant, non-violent.  His were quite the opposite.  Her understanding of the term “infidel” – NOT those who deny Islam, but those who do not live out the spirit of Islam – is quite provocative.  Radical Islam, she would maintain,  perverts the intention of the first Muslims.  

What to read next?

Some possibilities:

1.  To read more about the brain, coginitive science, and how we think about religion:  The God Instinct.

2.  To think more about the basic question, "Is There a God?" we could read Karen Armstrong's The Case for God.


3.  For a good overall look at what Christians believe, restated for a contemporary audience, there is To Begin at the Beginning, by UCC pastor Martin Copenhaver.

4.  To talk not so much about what Christians have believed about God, but what they think they should be doing about it:  Jim Wallis' Rediscovering Values (this from a Christian writer) or Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save (from a not so religious point of view).

Here's a link to a "To the Best of Our Knowledge" broadcast on religion in a secular age -- mentioning several books that might be of interest.  Thanks to Mick for sending this along.

Here are links to the above books:

Crossan's "God and Empire"

   We are seeking to understand -- probably in ways we have never considered  before -- the Christian faith.  If we paid attention in Sunday School and Confirmation, and can remember some of it, many of us have a vague idea that Jesus, whose mother never had sex, came to teach us how to live, died on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins, came back to life, and somehow went back up to heaven.  Our job on earth is to die (that we can do) and go to heaven (that may be in doubt).  We may also have been told 'way back when that God created the earth in seven days.

    All of which, or most of which, sounds pretty lame to many people who want to think rationally about their faith, the way they think about everything else that is important in life. 

   The Freedom from Religion folk recently polled their membership, asking what were their reasons for leaving religion behind.  Around 25% said that relgious claims made no [rational] sense; around 15% cited hypocrisy or bigotry among the faithful.  A smaller group said that reading skeptical authors made them skeptical, and a few said that reading the Bible was the last straw for them.  [Christian Century, January 11, 2011]  Our little group read one of those skeptics (Sam Harris), but not much yet of the Bible.  But a lot of us would say that many religious claims don't make much sense to us -- especially the traditional expressions of the faith as outlined above.

     And so we read John Dominic Crossan.  A scholar.  Who surely uses his reason, and a whole lot of historical and linguistic skills, to look at the biblical texts in very new ways.  Like Ellul, he sees the Jesus movement of the first century against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, and comes to very different conclusions (compared to traditional theology) about who Jesus was, why he came, and what his followers today should be doing.

   If you like reading history, then you'll like Crossan's God and Empire.  Below are some things I noted as I read the first two chapters in which he addresses "civilization" and its violent propensity, and then that violence as reflected in the Hebrew Scriptures.  In Chapter Three he'll head into the Gospels, followed by Saint Paul . . .  and at last the very end, that wild and crazy book of Revelation.  

Chapter One

Four kinds of power of empire:  military, economic, political, and ideological.  Crossan adds the power of non-violent "persuasion and attraction."

911. Purpose of the terrorists was to help us deny our own ideology.

Roman Imperial Power

Rome thought of itself in transcendental terms - "divinely mandated to rule without limits of time or place." Cites the poetry of Virgil, Horace, Ovid to support this.  They believed that the gods run the world, and since Caesar ran the world then Caesar must be a god.

Crossan's main point:  in the first century terms like "Son of God," "Lord," "Savior of the world" were reserved for the Emperor.  When the followers of Jesus took those terms and applied them to the Jewish peasant Jesus, they committed high treason.  To say that Jesus is Lord, and therefore Caesar is not is to make a radical, revolutionary statement.

Further:  the ideology of Rome said, "Victory first, then peace.". But the Christians, following their Lord Jesus, said no, "Justice first, and peace will follow." This non-violence of the earliest Christians stood in stark contrast to the prevailing wisdom of the first century - and the 21st too.

Empire and Civilization.  

Crossan then talks about the "normalcy" of violence even within "civilization."  He offers some definitions of "civilization," citing a group of scholars who talk about civilization as "cage" and as "trap."

"Violence is bred by injustice, poverty, inequality, and other violence. A full belly and a fair hearing won't stop a fanatic, but they will greatly reduce the number who become fanatics."

The world has yet to see a civilization without violence.  Is violence inevitable?  Crossan says No, that "normalcy is not destiny." To support that he cites the history of monastic communities across time.

At the end of Chapter One he says that monastic communities are a living witness that violence is NOT inevitable, that they are non-violent alternatives.  Also, that these coming few years will determine the fate of the world for many years to come - the 10,000 year experiment will stand or fall by what we do now.

The "ambiguity of divine power" - the rest of the book is about how the Bible views political, military, and ideological power.

Chapter Two:  The Ambiguity of Divine Power

Crossan will be looking first at the Genesis story of creation -- not as a historical account of origins, but as parables about God and humankind.

Traditional interpretation (the kind that fundamentalists, evangelicals, Catholics and many others would espouse) understands the story to be about human pride: simple disobedience of a command of God (don't eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil).  Crossan sees it as much more complex than that.

The two trees in the garden -- Moral Knowledge on the one hand, and Eternal Life on the other -- were reserved only for God. Humanity could have one or the other . . . but not both.  When Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden tree they forfeit the Garden -- not so much as punishment, but as consequence.  Armed with this new knowledge of Good and Evil they head out and . . .  there is the first act of violence, the killing of Able by his brother Cain.

The Flood Story shows a God who uses violence to cleanse a sinful world.  But does that violence (the killing of all humankind except one family) do any good? Crossan says No -- and thus begins the story of Abraham, a non-violent story of redemption. 

Crossan sees a big difference between Retributive and Distributive justice -- punishment/revenge versus equality distribution.  He cites a number of examples in the Old Testament to illustrate distributive justice: forbidding usury (loaning at interest), controlling collateral, freeing slaves, forgiving debts -- all built into the civil laws of the Jewish people in the Torah.

But there is also retributive justice -- a God who punishes, avenges.  Both retributive justice and distributive justice co-exists with one another in the biblical texts.  A violent God and a non-violent God is present, sometimes within the same chapter.  Are we supposed to embrace both Gods?  Crossan's thesis is that the Bible proposes a radically non-violent God "warring" against the normalcy of violent civilization.

He sees both a violent and a non-violent God in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  How does one choose?  By choosing the way of the Christ -- Jesus trumps all other views; he chose non-violence, and we as his followers must do the same.  See the last paragraph of Chapter Two.

A Radical Faith

If you’re looking for a new way of going at the Christian faith, Jacques Ellul is your man.  He insists it is not new – that he has not “discovered” some truth that all previous generations have overlooked.  He would point to many groups down through the centuries who dared to oppose the prevailing notion of the faith – as defined typically by the Church, that is, Rome. They longed for an authentic experience of God demonstrated in real life in acts of love, sacrifice, and justice.  They sought to model a new kind of community, one marked not by hierarchy, legalism and power but by equality, love, and care for the poor.

Christendom has been seduced time and time again by power – power corrupts, says Ellul, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Instead of faith empowering people to live in trust and harmony and mutual care and respect, it has been more often a means for power, for control over others.

“God is love,” says 1 John, and Ellul takes this as his fundamental belief.   Love requires freedom; God has given us that freedom so that we can love genuinely.  And so any act of control, when one person or an institution such as a government or church deprives another of his or her freedom, is sinful – morally corrupt.

Thus, anarchy: radical freedom of the individual with regard to any institution.  And in a statement that Sam Harris would like, Ellul says that “religion is an incontestable source of war.” (250 But by “religion” Ellul means a corrupted faith, one that seeks to destroy freedom, to make its adherents behave a certain way, especially in obedience to the officers of religion.

Ellul is careful to say that he is not a secular anarchist – the sort who seek to overthrow an institution only to replace it with another that will control people in new ways.  His Christian faith – which includes belief in “sin, not the breaking of moral law but rather covetousness and power (20) – won’t allow him the optimistic view that humankind is capable of a purely anarchist society.  “I do not believe in a pure anarchist society, but I do believe in the possibility of creating a new social model/” (21)

A brief essay in the Appendix by a priest, Adrien Duchosal, states the position most plainly: 

“I reject all human hierarchy.”  We congregationalist ought to warm to that!   But further, and more radically for a person of traditional faith:

“I reject hierarchy between us and God.”   And even further . . . 

“Finally to accept or reject the existence of God is unimportant.  What counts is having the taste and joy that live gives.”  (98)  That should take your breath away.

Ellul in the last half of the book is at pains to show that Christian anarchy is biblically based.  He begins with the Hebrew Scriptures, especially noting that the beginning of the monarchy was not God’s idea, but the Israelites’ – so that they could be like the other nations.  No good will come of it, says the Lord.  And none did, says Ellul.  So far from being instituted by God – Divine Right, we later called it – the monarchy was a human device only reluctantly allowed by God.  (God gave us freedom to do dumb things, remember.)  

In the gospels Ellul is most interested in how Jesus responded to the powers of his day, embodied in the religions rulers and by Pilate at his trial.  That Jesus had nothing good to say about the former is certain.  When confronted with Rome itself, Jesus said nothing – a contemptuous silence Ellul would say. 

The book of Revelation, that strange piece of apocalyptic writing, portrays government – Rome, “Babylon” – as being against all that is good.  Ellul (and an article in the Appendix) also addresses Romans 13 – “a very embarrassing passage” he says, page 86.  Embarrassing because at first blush (and this is the way the Powers That Be have always read it for obvious reasons) Paul seems to be telling Christians to obey every authority as if they are God Himself.  

Of course Romans 13 is “embarrassing” only to those who take the Bible (“cover to cover”) as the authoritative Word of God.  Ellul despite he radical understanding of how Christian faith should be lived is nevertheless quite orthodox in his faith in many ways.  He thus feels it important to show that his Christian anarchy is biblically based and supported by an authoritative scripture.

Jacques Ellul Should Shake You Up

We are beginning Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity.  To set that in the context of our last six months' explorations, I offer the following.

To summarize where we’ve been, and why we’re here now:

In the grand scheme of things (MY grand scheme, such as it is) we have explored cognitive science – trying to have some idea of how this brain of ours works, especially with regard to religious impulse. Then we heard one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement – Sam Harris – as he called for renunciation of all religion, but especially fundamentalism, to be replaced by reason.  He made room for spiritual, even mystical experience, and morality too, but all to be achieved by scientific research.  Just for fun, here’s a great video of Steve Martin and the Step Canyon Rangers, performing “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs.”  

Haught took aim at scientific naturalism like that of Harris, alleging that scientific, purely materialistic reason could not completely explain human experience.  Something beyond us – God, we might say – beckons us on to emerging experiences.  Human intelligence emerging from unintelligent matter, he said, was the greatest evidence for the existence of a god.

Our brains seem to be wired – or is it conditioned, a matter of contention – to be on the lookout for agents (natural or supernatural) acting in the world, from what can easily be explained (I shank a golf shot, I feel rage) to what provokes speechless awe (a view from the Hubble telescope) and seemingly defies explanation.  Especially for people who, like me, whose brain is getting more clogged up every day.  (Time to Defragment.)

Looking for a sufficient agent to account for our reality, we posit a God, or at least most people have.  If I am prepared to explore that possibility (and have not ruled it out before giving the idea a chance – Haught’s charge against the scientific naturalists) then the next question is which God?  -- the human race having come up with a variety of options.

Living where we are, we naturally look first to the Christian faith.  And run smack into some ridiculous claims by its more vocal followers.  Like the world is only 6K years old.  And we hit a book that in places describes God more like an angry child than like a God I want to follow.   Like when your son rebels, have him stoned – that’ll teach him.

Put off by the literalists – here I point you to this great sermon by one such practitioner, on a passage of interest especially to males, er, men -- many of us have dismissed the Bible and Christianity altogether.  Thus , Marcus Borg’s contention that a modern person, without denying all that we have learned about science and culture and language, can read the Bible a new/old way.

Using the lens especially of metaphor, says Borg, modern people can reclaim a faith that is both intellectually sound and experientially satisfying.  His book, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, was an outline of Borg’s methodology and the faith he sees through a fresh reading of the Bible.

We now are looking at two contemporary theologians -- Jacques Ellul and John Dominic Crossan -- who put forth their understanding of Christianity, understandings that are quite different from mainline Protestant faith and, perhaps especially, Fundamentalists. 

Ellul’s portrayal of faith is starkly contrarian – thoroughly and uncompromisingly opposed to “the Church” as expressed in Catholic and Protestant establishments.  He says he has discovered nothing new – there have always been individuals and small movements who have protested against the authority of (and misdeeds of) institutionalized Christendom.  Ellul’s understanding of Christianity is nothing like what we learned in Sunday School!